Dear Poetry Friends
JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 2026 NEWSLETTER
including
NEW Poetry and Discovery lunchtime at The Lamb, Bloomsbury
NEW Poetry and weekend retreat on the Dorset coast
NEW Poetry and Hope online
NEW Poetry and Silence evening at The Lamb, Bloomsbury
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LIVE IN LONDON – NEW LAMB SERIES ALSO AT LUNCHTIME NOW |
NEW LIVE EVENT – places available
POETRY AND DISCOVERY AT THE LAMB
Tuesday 13 January 2026
1130am-1245 (interval for lunch there 1245-2pm) then 2pm-3pm
Good menu available
Empire Bar, The Lamb, 94 Lamb’s Conduit St, London WC1N 3LZ
Poems from Adcock, Aiken, Berryman, Bishop, Causley, cummings, Hardy, Hirshfield, F Horowitz, Jamie, Jennings, Kinnell, Kooser, Lalíc, Larkin, Millay, Ormond, Tranströmer, W C Williams
MORE DETAILS AND TO BOOK: https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetryanddiscoverylunchtime-2-2-2
THREE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY MONTH EVENTS
POETRY AND . . .
LIVE ON THE DORSET COAST
Thursday 5th to Sunday 8th February 2026
from 4pm on Thursday 5th to after lunch on Sunday 8th
Othona Community, Coast Road, Burton Bradstock, Bridport, Dorset
9 places already taken, 5 left.
We are living in unusual times. Never has a small community like Othona seemed more able to fill the gap in our lives and massage what we have.
The four themes of this weekend belong together like a quartet of instruments: hope against the odds, strength to manage our lives and ourselves, discovery of new ways and possibilities, and silence as a place of renewal and energy.
These retreat sessions are always focused and informal. Everyone can feel free to express their thoughts and feelings about the poems as they want to. A lot of ground gets covered, poems and readers come alive, and friends are quickly made of the poets and each other.
This retreat may book up quite quickly, as Othona has a large database to publish to. For full details, including more about Othona and how to book, go to:
https://www.othonawestdorset.org.uk/civicrm/event/info?id=2364
POETRY AND HOPE ONLINE
George Fredrick Watts and assistants, Hope (1886), Tate Britain, London
Wednesday 11 February 2026, 1530 to 1700 online
For George Herbert, hope is an anchor and for Emily Dickinson a thing with feathers. But the painter G F Watts had other ideas: he pictured it (above) as a she, blind or at least blindfolded, sitting in awkward comfort on top of the world and trying to hear what music the single surviving string of her broken lyre could play to her and anyone listening. The enigma is telling.
Some of the poets featured in our session leave us in no doubt as to how they see hope. Others share Watts’s sense of it as a mystery. Quite which is which we will discover in poems by America’s Dickinson, Emerson and Wylie; Nobel Laureates Heaney and Szymborska; Wales’s former National Poet Gillian Clarke; Hardy, Herbert, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Patrick Creagh, and a single verse from Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
These sessions are always focused and informal. Everyone can feel free to express their thoughts and feelings about the poems as they want to. A lot of ground gets covered, poems and readers come alive, and friends are quickly made of the poets and each other. More details and to book, click https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetryandhopeonline2026-2-2-2-2
POETRY AND SILENCE AT THE LAMB
Tuesday 24 February 2026, 7-915pm good supper menu available
Empire Bar, The Lamb, 94 Lamb’s Conduit St, London WC1N 3LZ
Poems from Akhmatova, Basho, Dickinson, Frost, J Graham, Heaney, Herbert, Keats, Qiu Wei, Rimbaud, Saba, Sappho, W Stevens, Edward Thomas, Wordsworth, Yeats
Edward Thomas is gifted an owl’s cry in the night, Arthur Rimbaud holds his breath at dawn, Jorie Graham reflects on silence in the poem, Qiu Wei is walking in the hills, Wallace Stevens whispering about Winter.
These sessions are always focused and informal. Everyone can feel free to express their thoughts and feelings about the poems as they want to. A lot of ground gets covered, poems and readers come alive, and friends are quickly made of the poets and each other. For more, click on https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetryandsilenceeveningatthelamb-2-2-2
All best wishes
Graham